1916] The Ottawa Naturalist. 121 



shaped square. The long arm should be of a known length. 

 The T-shaped staff when used is held vertical to the surface of 

 the inclined beds to be measured, while the eye sights along 

 the short arm in a direction at right angles to the line of strike 

 to a point on the ground which will be the next station base 

 for the staff. Each station occupied will have an elevation 

 above the preceding one in the section corresponding to the 

 length of the staff. 



Objects Sought. 



Brief consideration of some of the purposes for which fossils 

 are collected will indicate to what extent the methods outlined 

 in the preceding pages are essential in different classes of work, 

 and whether they may be expanded or shortened in connection 

 with collecting which has different objects in view. 



There is probably no other branch of natural history col- 

 lecting which may lead to the solution of such a variety of 

 problems as the collecting of fossils. The problems of the 

 the palaeontologist include within their range those of struc- 

 tural geology, the restoration of ancient physical geographies, 

 and the problem of evolution. Whatever the purpose of the 

 collector may be, however, the precise location of the rocks 

 furnishing the specimens and their relationship to other beds in 

 the locality should always appear on the locality label. 



During an earlier stage in the development of palaeon- 

 tology the discovery of new species was the ultima thule of the 

 collector. This is still an important and legitimate object of 

 the collector's work, for many thousands of species as yet un- 

 known to science doubtless remain to be discovered, described 

 and systematically placed in the immense catalogue of the 

 earth's extinct life. Many collectors and palaeontologists of 

 an earlier generation were content to refer their new species 

 to the LoAver Carboniferous, the Upper Silurian, or to a major 

 division of whatever system they were derived from. Our pre- 

 sent ideal, though not always attained, is to indicate the place 

 of a new species in the section where discovered with the utmost 

 exactness. This kind of painstaking care on the part of the 

 collector and the author of a new species will ultimately, if not 

 at once, make possible its reference to its proper place in the 

 general geological time scale w4th a precision comparable to 

 that with which the railway engineer refers a particular station 

 on his line to its exact position above sea level. This tendency 

 toward greater refinement and precision in the methods of the 

 palaeontologist is one of the factors which has lead to an exten- 

 sive revision and expansion of formational nomenclature. The 

 description of a new species, important as it is, can at present be 



